AMD's strength in four- and eight-processor systems seems set to continue. Intel is unlikely to offer Nehalem variants for these machines before the end of 2009. Intel's Dunnington chips cannot keep up with AMD's Shanghai because of their restricted main memory bandwidth. Consequently, the two chip-makers will continue to give each other good reason to improve performance and feature sets, and the power user will continue to reap the rewards.

Of course, AMD has to price them right, which in AMDland means they have to be able to make sizable quantities of them. We'll find that out when we get initial pricing. If they can't make many, they'll price them sky high and milk the most out of meager production. But if they can, we'll see Penryn-like pricing, and if that's the case, I think AMD will have its first winner in a long time on its hands, both in the OEM market and, if they can overclock decently, even in the enthusiast market. Not like AMD is going to take over the world or anything, but when you have the enemy flat on his back, you shouldn't let him get back on his feet just to make a relative handful of extra dollars. nVidia made that mistake, and Intel looks like they're going to repeat it.

And we now know what we are looking at for overclocking.

AMD's "Maui" home theater PC platform consists of a combination of AMD hardware and software. Systems built around the platform feature an energy efficient Phenom or Athlon processor, ATI Radeon graphics, ATI TV tuners, and AMD LIVE! software elements. The current foundation of the platform is MSI's somewhat unique Media Live DIVA 5.1 motherboard, which is based on the AMD 780M chipset, and includes a specialized Intersil D2 Ausio DAE-3 audio chip with an accompanying 5.1 channel amplifier, but a 3.1 / 7.1 pre-amplifier card is also an option.

The main improvements are expected to be the 45nm process, an improved prefetch, increased and improved caching, faster virtualisation and a new energy-efficient, cache-saving feature called Smart Fetch. Subhas Patel, managing director of system builder Satine Interactive said that, despite being a “shrunken version” of the Barcelona chip (down from 65nm), the Opteron is solid. Randy Allen, senior vice president at AMD’s computing solutions group, added: “Opteron gives the most dramatic performance and performance-per-watt increases for AMD products for four years.”

Despite the focus on the Shanghai, you may also have noticed that AMD has switched to a 'Fusion' theme in terms of its branding, which is why our thumbnail is using that Fusion logo. Unfortunately, while the marketing is out and we have been hearing about Fusion for a while now (there's even a white paper on AMD's site about the whole idea of fusion), it's not here yet. Short story: it's about being more efficient by having general purpose CPUs enhanced with integrated, specialized accelerators that are better at certain tasks, like GPUs. However, we won't be seeing this yet, since we believe that AMD will only go full steam on this approach (if ever) when they get to 32nm.